Exhibition examines East Timor

After Dili Action
By Tom Nicholson
West Space Gallery, 15-19 Anthony St, Melbourne
April 5 to 15

In August, Melbourne-based artist Tom Nicholson travelled to East Timor to work with East Timorese campaigning for independence in the lead-up to the UN ballot. During his stay he performed an action in Dili, using archival material from World War II and drawing on the complex connections between East Timor, Australia and Western colonialism.

His exhibition, After Dili Action, presents a reduced configuration of material from this action. Nicholson describes the logic of his work in terms of contemporary politics and “its reach beyond visibility”.

“It is a response to the problem of how to represent suffering respectfully”, he says. “I try to indicate histories indirectly using processes of repetition, both with drawing and with inserting historical documents into contemporary circumstances.”

After Dili Action is showing at the new address of Melbourne's oldest artist-run gallery, West Space Gallery. The gallery hours are 12-6pm Wednesday to Friday and 11am-5pm on Saturdays.

In May the work will be shown in Sydney at the Ivan Dogherty Gallery, at the University of NSW, Paddington, as part of Critical Response, an exhibition of political work from Australia and Asia.

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